Compassionate Readership: Anger and Suffering in Sapphire’s Push

This article departs from polarizing academic discussions of compassion by exploring the relationship between anger and compassion in Sapphire’s novel Push. Martha Nussbaum explains that compassion can function as an ethical bridge that links one person to the next. Conversely, affect theorists, such as Lauren Berlant or Candace Vogler, argue that compassion reaffirms unequal relations of power, as individuals give or withhold their compassion when they see fit, leaving the circumstances that lead to suffering unaddressed. These discussions are complicated by the ongoing stereotypes that blame black women for their plight, leading people to withhold their compassion. Rather than expose these stereotypes as false constructs, this article focuses on the narrative pattern where Precious experiences egregious abuse, expresses intense anger at her suffering, and then longs for markers of privilege, such as white skin and affluence. It contends that Precious’s anger disrupts passive compassion, reminding readers of vectors of identity such as race, class, and body size that simultaneously give rise to and erase Precious’s suffering.